Links: PC-BSD 8.1 and Lightspark 0.4.2 Released, Other Free Software/Open Source News
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2010-07-22 18:55:05 UTC
- Modified: 2010-07-22 19:00:10 UTC
Summary: Today's news about digital freedom and openness
Morevna is an open source anime project made using open source tools like Synfig, Blender, GIMP and Krita. Unlike Project London Movie, Morevna is not only created using free and open source tools, but Morevna anime will also be released and distributed as free content. This project definitely deserves a lot of appreciation.
Whether you just want to balance your checkbook or you need to track the finances of a large global corporation, you can find open source software to do the job. For our list of open source financial tools, we cast a wide net and included applications related to enterprise resource management, point-of-sale and even employee time tracking. Not to mention traditional accounting and financial management tools.
One trend worth noting -- a huge number of the open source tools on this list, particularly the business applications, are now available on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis. For businesses, this model seems to make sense, as it gives them access to support and reduces the need for in-house staff to deploy and monitor applications. It also enables a more mobile workforce and keeps costs low. And of course, this model is also great for open source vendors as it gives them another way to monetize their open source projects.
Without further ado, here are fifty open source applications that might be able to replace the financial software you currently use for your home or business.
If you haven’t run into a situation where you need to rename multiple files in one go, you haven’t been using a computer for long. When the next time comes, turn to KRename. Its simple graphical interface makes renaming files easy for average users, and it offers a powerful template language for advanced users with more complex renaming tasks. Although it was written for the KDE desktop, KRename works under other Linux platforms and even on Windows.
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Web Browsers
Last week we showed Opera 10.60 to be the world's fastest Web browser. That was in the Windows world. But where do Chrome, Firefox, and Opera stand in Linux? Today we find out. Adding the Win 7 results, we'll also learn which OS has the speediest browser.
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Mozilla
Firefox 3.6.7 and Firefox 3.5.11 are now available as free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux from http://firefox.com. As always, we recommend that users keep up to date with the latest stability and support versions of Firefox, and encourage all our users to upgrade to the very latest version, Firefox 3.6.7.
The latest Firefox 4.0 nightly build adds a new download ("Save link as") / upload dialog - in Linux that is, as I didn't try Firefox 4.0 Windows or Mac builds. This may have been added earlier but only now I've noticed it.
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SaaS
There’s a real explosion of cloud platforms and management tools, it seems you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one these days. In the commercial proprietary solutions space you have – CA’s 3Terra AppLogic, Enomaly, Nimbula, RightScale. In open source there are Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, Open Nebula and Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. There are a bunch more that I failed to mention. It makes you wonder do we really need another one? How much different can they be?Rackspace Champion's Open Source Cloud I am not sure but the newest one appears to be rather significant.
NASA is dropping Eucalyptus from its Nebula infrastructure cloud not only because its engineers believe the open source platform can't achieve the sort of scale they require, but also because it isn't entirely open source.
NASA chief technology officer Chris Kemp tells The Reg that as his engineers attempted to contribute additional Eucalyptus code to improve its ability to scale, they were unable to do so because some of the platform's code is open and some isn't. Their attempted contributions conflicted with code that was only available in a partially closed version of platform maintained by Eucalyptus Systems Inc., the commercial outfit run by the project's founders.
In some ways Facebook is still a LAMP site (kind of), but it has had to change and extend its operation to incorporate a lot of other elements and services, and modify the approach to existing ones.
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BSD
The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5
One of the features that sets FreeBSD apart from other open source opeating systems, is its governance structure. FreeBSD is not owned by a company, though many companies use it and contribute code back, but yet is run as if it were a company, with the Core Team taking decisions and steering the Project.
The FreeBSD Foundation funds various projects each year and there are several interesting projects in progress:
* DAHDI (formerly known as Zaptel) FreeBSD driver port--this project will make it possible to use FreeBSD as a base system for software PBX solutions
* resource containers and a simple per-jail resource limits mechanism
* userland dtrace
* BSNMP improvements
* jail-based virtualization
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Project Releases
The Lightspark project has released version 0.4.2 of its free, open source Flash player. According to Lightspark develoepr Alessandro Pignotti, the alternative Flash Player implementation is "designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hope fully) future hardware".
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Government
Operating as the Open Information Security Foundation, and working with a number of government-related private companies, a team headed by Mark Jonkman of Emerging Threats and Victor Julien of the Vuurmuur firewall project are offering an intrusion detection and prevention engine with multi-threading automatic protocol detection for a wide variety of protocols.
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Openness/Sharing
It's an ambitious effort to preserve, restore and promote the re-use of traditional skills and inventions from all over the world.
We risk stifling the development of new tools, both commercial and academic, and new knowledge under the weight of a legal regime that was designed to cope with the printing press. At the same time a simple statement that this kind of analysis is fair dealing will provide certainty without damaging the interests of copyright holders or complicating copyright law. These new uses will ultimately bring more traffic, and perhaps more customers, to the primary documents. By taking the simple and easy step of making automated analysis an allowable fair dealing exception everyone wins.
After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.
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Open Data
Opening up food and agricultural data requires an information architecture and infrastructure that does not currently exist. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization is a leader in providing easily accessible, highly usable, and surprisingly current data, but right now it is far ahead of the pack in terms of transparency in reporting.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Society Will Only Improve Owing to People Who Push Boundaries
- Push boundaries with ideas and facts, not with forbidden language
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- Only 1.5% Oppose the European Patent Office's (EPO) Strikes and Other Industrial Actions Until 2027
- Among those polled/surveyed (in a ballot)
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 19, 2026
- IRC logs for Friday, June 19, 2026
- Gopher/Gemini Links 20/06/2026: Slop With Tcl/Tk and Nokia 770 Perishes
- Links for the day
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 111 Out of 200: Garrett and Graveley (the Latter Arrested for Strangling Women) Keep Ousting Their Collaboration in Litigation, Lawfare in a Foreign Continent
- it's not law, it's just warfare disguised as "law"
- European Patent Office (EPO) Series: Lobbying in Lisbon...
- reappointment campaign lobbying has not been restricted to the "home front" in Portugal
- Slop Making Its Way Into Terms Where It Does Not Belong
- Hopefully by year's end Google News can successfully cull (and deprive of traffic) almost all slopfarms
- Links 19/06/2026: Microsoft Patent Troll Intellectual Ventures in Europe, "World Cup of Internet Resilience"
- Links for the day
- Links 19/06/2026: Salesforce Data Thefts and GAFAM's Conspiracy Theories That Data Center Opposition is a Foreign Plot
- Links for the day
- Links 19/06/2026: The Retweeting Class and Data Centres as National Security Risk
- Links for the day
- Don't Attack the Wives (or Spouses) of Pundits/Activists/Journalists
- We will be writing several series about this in the future
- Internet Relay Chat (Shorthand IRC) is Still Growing
- Contrariwise, social control media is waning
- The Register MS Published a New Page With "AI" 21 Times in It. It Was Paid SPAM.
- The former editor of the The Register MS admitted to me (directly) that he knew all this "AI" stuff was stupid hype
- Murdoch's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) Associates Dependence on a Ponzi Scheme With "the Future"
- Those ludicrous ads (disguised as rankings) from WSJ deserve scorn and ridicule
- The XBox Story is Still Fast-Developing, the Layoffs Are Confirmed to be Happening Already (Mid-June), Just Not "Officially"
- Workers have Microsoft have long braced for what is happening this summer and will accelerate further in two weeks' time
- Fake News From Rupert Murdoch's WSJ Could Not Keep IBM From Sinking
- "2026 Best Companies for the Future"?
- To GNU, AV2 Adoption May be a Year If Not Years Away
- The leap between versions means that there is fertile ground for incompatibilities
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 18, 2026
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 18, 2026
- Gemini Links 19/06/2026: "Born and Raised by the Internet", Fifteen Years in Gopher
- Links for the day
- Links 18/06/2026: Clown Computing Has Harmful Sound, Facebook "Must Face the Music (Infringement Litigation)"
- Links for the day
- Digital Sovereignty Discussed in the United Kingdom (UK)
- Digital Sovereignty would be nice, but let's remember what contributes to it
- IBM Adds Only More IBM Staff to the Fedora Council, They Like LLM Slop for Posting 'Articles'
- It's like Canonical with Ubuntu, only worse
- IBM Common Stock Down to About $250, It Was at $330 Just 17 Days Ago
- Happy birthday IBM!
- Microsoft's CEO Openly Admits XBox is Not Sustainable and Microsoft is Beginning to Admit Slop Isn't Working and Is Not Not Sustainable Either
- Expect Microsoft cancellations next month (or later this month) to impact far more than XBox and some studios
- EPO and Disabilities: Payments Allegedly Disabled
- But people who do cocaine can claim paid "sick leave" (over 100,000 euros for no work at all) if the President sleeps with them
- SLAPP Censorship - Part 110 Out of 200: Anti-SLAPP Reform Formally Advanced in the United Kingdom (UK) the Same Week the Serial Strangler From Microsoft (US) Does Forum-Shopping in the UK
- The only language they understand is money. They don't understand privacy.
- Links 18/06/2026: UK Social Media Ban for Minors, Finland Lifts a Nuclear Weapons Ban
- Links for the day
- 'Article' With "AI" 27 Times in the Page, It's "Partner Content" (Paid Spam) as Usual at The Register MS
- We deem this a timely reminder that a lot of the hype around slop is paid-for lies
- Microsoft Layoffs Have Reportedly Already Started at ZeniMax
- The overall scale is unknown
- Cyber Show: "Our independence remains intact and we're set to continue relentlessly probing the world of digital technology with hard questions"
- As one should
- European Patent Office (EPO) Series: Leveraging the Lusitanian Connection
- Mendonça no longer functions as an independent agent but rather as a fig-leaf for a mafia-like entity that prizes obedience over integrity and self-preservation over truth
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 17, 2026
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